New map offers precise snapshot of human life on Earth

A global map showing nearly every human settlement on Earth is now available to researchers. Compared to previous mapping efforts, the satellite-based Global Urban Footprint dataset not only shows urban centres, but also tiny rural hamlets. The black-on-white Global Urban Footprint (GUF) map is a portrait of the human presence on Earth in 2012, to a maximum resolution of 12 m, covering even single houses.

The dataset has been made freely available via the European Space Agency ’s online Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) at full spatial resolution of 12 m for scientific use, along with an easier to handle 84 m version for any non-profit use.

The DLR German Aerospace Center, which produced the map, was not previously able to obtain all the villages in rural areas. Yet, these rural settlements are currently still home to almost half of the global population – around three billion people, and could be crucial to understanding population distribution or disease vectors, for example, or assessing pressures on biodiversity.

ESA’s U-TEP platform has now been used to process a new auxiliary optical layer for the map based on more than 400 000 Landsat multispectral images – providing an additional dimension of information to users.

This new auxiliary layer is also serving as a basis for a follow-on Global Urban Footprint+ map for 2015 derived from Landsat in combination with Europe’s Sentinel-1 satellite imagery and showing a spatial resolution of 30 m.

Ultimately, on-demand Global Urban Footprint processing will be made available to users for any time and any place on Earth through the U-TEP and Europe’s Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data.

U-TEP is one of six Thematic Exploitation Platforms developed by ESA to serve data user communities. These cloud-based platforms provide an online environment to access information, processing tools and computing resources for collaboration. TEPs allow knowledge to be extracted from large environmental datasets produced through Europe’s Copernicus programme and other Earth observation satellites.